Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism

This special issue focusses on the transition of tourism in coastal communities to more resilient futures. A wide range of land- and marine tourism activities take place in coastal communities, and marine tourism, such as cruise tourism is often promoted as a way to develop the host communities and regional economies. Such communities are, however, particularly vulnerable to disturbances, unexpected shocks, and crises, such as climate change, depopulation, or pandemics. As well as identifying and developing desirable futures, communities need opportunities and activities, including tourism, that create economic value while sustaining livelihoods and restoring and preserving natural and social resources. Change practices, innovation, governance, and resilience are key themes and there is a need to critically rethink the connections between resilient communities and sustainable development in future.
As the travel industry rebounds from the pandemic, it is expected that established coastal destinations will continue to grow and new destinations will emerge. While a great debate has emerged around the impacts of tourism on coastal communities and how to manage tourism development to ensure sustainability, we know relatively little about change practices of stakeholders directly affected by and involved in tourism development. Research has shown that, despite differences between communities, the way marine tourism activities are perceived by stakeholders, depends on the balance between different types of visitor segments (land-based, marine-based, organized, or individual travelers) and the development stage of the destination. There is a need for more knowledge on how communities develop change practices and innovate for sustainability and resilience as global anthropogenic transformations have made striving for sustainability more urgent and prominent. Consequently, understanding the environmental, economic, and socio-cultural impacts of tourism in coastal communities, is an important task that has recently been emphasized by several tourism researchers.

In this special issue we encourage an approach that invites many more actors than the tourism industries into a coastal tourism ontology, which allows for telling tourism not as a uni-dimensional ´tool´ for development or ´threat´ for nature and culture of coastal communities, but as a messy, distributed, and collaborative achievement and a process of making-with, becoming-with and thinking-with a much larger collective than the usual tourism stakeholders. By including many stories and identifying the ideological influences that are at work, we can ask whose interests are being served by a particular ideology.

This special issue is geared towards sharing research on the challenges and possibilities of tourism from the perspective of local communities in which it occurs. Academics so far only generated very few insights on how tourism communities are defining, governing, and implementing the principles of sustainability to prevent negative impacts, or to develop in a favorable direction. Consequently, there is a need to explore how local communities understand, engage with, and adapt to coastal tourism and sustainability, or even finding alternative paths to their future development. It therefore seems timely to examine the concepts of change practices, sustainability, resilience, innovation, and coastal community development at both organizational and community level. This call responds to the acknowledgement that tourism needs to be reoriented towards the public good, and that the types of tourism developed should be decided by the local community. We are therefore looking for voices from coastal tourism communities that discuss and imagine ways tourism can be developed to enable human, non-human and environmental wellbeing.

Accordingly, this call for papers seeks original and relevant conceptual and empirical papers on how coastal tourism activities offer opportunities and pose challenges for tourism and hospitality actors, communities, regions, and coastal environment and how these stakeholders adapt, change, and innovate accordingly. We would like to encourage a critical dialog regarding these aspects and engage in the discussions of possible futures for coastal regions, conserving the co-existing development of tourism and other economic sectors.

For this special issue we encourage submissions that that examine sustainability and resilience practices in the context of coastal, Arctic, and Nordic tourism and hospitality. Suggested research themes include but are not limited to:

• Tourism communities: resilience and sustainability
• Mechanisms for promotion of the engagement of local stakeholders with coastal and/or marine tourism
• Governance and management of marine tourism development
• Innovation, knowledge and change management
• Institutional entrepreneurship, social movement, and collective action of tourism stakeholders
• Employment and labor markets in the context of coastal tourism and hospitality
• Emerging, innovative or participatory research methods and methodologies
• Community leadership and collaboration in tourism and across other economic sectors
• Role of land-based tourism activities in the cruise tourism development: lessons learned and ways forward
• Adaptations of coastal tourism development in the post pandemic era and risk management
• Role of public and private sector collaboration in adaptations and crisis management in times of global pandemics

Suggested literature:

• Cheer, J. M., & Lew, A. A. (Eds.). (2017). Tourism, resilience and sustainability: Adapting to social, political and economic change. Routledge.
• Dans, E. P., & González, P. A. (2019). Sustainable tourism and social value at World Heritage Sites: Towards a conservation plan for Altamira, Spain. Annals of Tourism Research, 74, 68-80.
• Dimitrovski, D., Lemmetyinen, A., Nieminen, L., & Pohjola, T. (2021). Understanding coastal and marine tourism sustainability-A multi-stakeholder analysis. Journal of Destination Marketing & Management, 19, 100554.
• Hall, M. C., & Saarinen, J. (2020). 20 Years of Nordic climate change crisis and tourism research: a review and future research agenda. Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism, 1-9.
• Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
• Higgins-Desbiolles, F. (2006). More than an “industry”: The forgotten power of tourism as a social force. Tourism Management, 27(6), 1192-1208.
• Higgins-Desbiolles, F., Carnicelli, S., Krolikowski, C., Wijesinghe, G., & Boluk, K. (2019). Degrowing tourism: Rethinking tourism. Journal of Sustainable Tourism.
• Higgins-Desbiolles, F. (2020). Socialising tourism for social and ecological justice after COVID-19. Tourism Geographies, 22(3), 610-623.
• Higham, J., & Carr, A. (2002). Ecotourism visitor experiences in Aotearoa/New Zealand: challenging the environmental values of visitors in pursuit of pro-environmental behaviour. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 10(4), 277-294.
• Michael Hall, C., & Saarinen, J. (2021). 20 Years of Nordic climate change crisis and tourism research: a review and future research agenda. Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism, 21(1), 102-110.
• Heikkinen, H. I., Bjørst, L. R., & Pashkevich, A. (2020). Challenging Tourism Landscapes of Southwest Greenland: Identifying Social and Cultural Capital for Sustainable Tourism Development. Arctic Anthropology, 57(2), 212-228.
• James, L., Olsen, L. S., & Karlsdóttir, A. (2020). Sustainability and cruise tourism in the arctic: Stakeholder perspectives from Ísafjörður, Iceland and Qaqortoq, Greenland. Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 28(9), 1425-1441.
• Ren, C. B., & Jóhannesson, G. T. (2017). Collaborative becoming: Exploring tourism knowledge collectives. In Ren, C., Jóhannesson, G. T., & Van der Duim, R. (Eds.). (2017). Co-creating tourism research: Towards collaborative ways of knowing. Oxon: Routledge.
• Ren, C. & Chimirri, D. (2018). Arctic tourism - more than an industry? The Arctic Institute. Accessed April 19 2021: https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/arctic-tourism-industry/
• Ren, C. (2021). (Staying with) the trouble with tourism and travel theory? Tourist Studies, 21(1), 133–140
• Saarinen, J., & Gill, A. M. (Eds.). (2018). Resilient destinations and tourism: Governance strategies in the transition towards sustainability in tourism. Routledge.
• Weaver, D. B., & Lawton, L. J. (2017). A new visitation paradigm for protected areas. Tourism Management, 60, 140-146.
• Welch, D., Halkier, B., & Keller, M. (2020). Introduction to the Special Issue: Renewing Theories of Practice and Reappraising the Cultural. Cultural Sociology, 14(4), 325-339.

An abstract between 400 and 500 words should be sent to all guest editors via email before 01.02.2023 to the following addresses:

[email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

When abstracts fit well with the aims of the current call, the authors are invited to submit full manuscripts via the journal’s submission system: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/sjht for double-blind peer review. Full paper manuscripts of 6,000–7,000 words inclusive of tables/references/figure captions /footnotes /endnotes based on original empirical research or theory building are invited to this special issue.

Publication process
Submissions will be subject to double blind peer review in accordance with the SJHT guidelines for authors and editorial policies.

Key dates
Abstract submission: 01.02.2023
Feedback on abstract: 01.04.2023
Deadline for manuscript submission: 01.12.2023
Reviews/feedback on manuscript, on or before: 01.05.2024
Final manuscript due: 01.09.2024
Anticipated online publication: 01.10.2024

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